'Mourning a scourge of the comfortable'

A Washington Post story by Dana Milbank covers the memorial service for John Wilke, Wall Street Journal investigative reporter. The service was held in the Newseum in Washington. The story wonders if this was also a memorial service of sorts for investigative journalism.

Key paragraph:

Most people associate journalism with globetrotting White House correspondents or the ideologues of the op-ed page. But the ones losing their jobs now are more important: thousands of lesser-known John Wilkes across the country, holding officials to account at all levels of government. At a Senate hearing last month on the decline of newspapers, David Simon, the reporter turned HBO producer, put it this way: "The next 10 or 15 years in this country are going to be a halcyon era for state and local political corruption. It is going to be one of the great times to be a corrupt politician."